A friend on Facebook sent me the following message. I’ve edited it to make fragments of sentences into sentences and to correct spelling mistakes.
It relates to my post a few days ago about government officials referring to voluntarily chosen prostitution as “trafficking.”
I saw your EconLog post on sex trafficking. I was going to post this story as a comment but decided it was too long. Still, I thought you’d like to hear it.
Several years ago a female coworker from Raleigh told us over lunch that she had almost been kidnapped by sex traffickers at a Target in Raleigh. Astonished, we asked what happened. She said a man came up to her and made a comment about her t-shirt. That was it. She was young and attractive and our company was known for our witty t-shirts. I suggested that he was just trying to start a conversation. She insisted that she had seen stories about multiple sex trafficking arrests at that Target. So, in her view, he must have been a kidnapper. When I got back to my desk I googled cases of sex trafficking in Raleigh Targets. She was right: there were at least 4 or 5 high profile cases. But when I read through over a dozen paragraphs, I eventually found out that they were all simply regular prostitution. There was no trafficking and there were no kidnappers. The cops dressed it up as trafficking because they got more headlines and more federal dollars fighting non-existent trafficking, and the news media went along with it for the clicks. Because of this, at least one woman in Raleigh was terrified of going to Target for fear of being kidnapped. (italics added)
READER COMMENTS
steve
Oct 19 2024 at 9:21am
This goes way beyond individual stores. It is given as one of the many things immigrants are supposedly doing. They are supposedly trafficking kids for trafficking by the thousands yet they never seem to catch any. Heck, lots of people who believe this stuff still think there are kids in the basement at the pizza place in DC, they are just hidden too well to find. They are also blamed for bringing fentanyl, never mind that drugs enter the country regardless of the rate of immigration. Then there’s the pets.
Steve
Komori
Oct 19 2024 at 11:36am
I’m just going to leave this link…
Jon Murphy
Oct 20 2024 at 5:48am
Agreed. Bigotry likes to hide behind shocking crimes to justify itself. “Oh, I’m not bigoted. It’s just that this particular group of people [immigrants, rich people, whoever] are so uniquely evil because of (circle one: eating pets, weird sex stuff, whatever) and therefore need to be ruthlessly prosecuted in society.”
johnson85
Oct 21 2024 at 5:34pm
I don’t think it’s a stretch to think that more economically disadvantaged and socially isolated illegal immigrants coming in means more of them will be pimped out in something closer to sex slavery than voluntary prostitution.
I get the concern that paternalistic people are assuming that something they would not want to engage in must be coerced, but I think that a lot of prostitution is essentially coerced, and that the likelihood of being coerced increased when the prostitutes are young runaways or are immigrants separated from family.
Knut P. Heen
Oct 23 2024 at 9:49am
Immigration (legal or not) must be financed. How do poor people show up at a border far away from their home country?
I suspect the same way many poor people traveled to North America from Europe 150-400 years ago. Indentured servitude.
I suspect organized crime transports immigrants from their home country to the border in exchange for working for them after they have crossed the border. Organized crime has a comparative advantage at all parts of the deal here, fake passports, bribes to cross borders, jobs at arrival.
David Henderson
Oct 23 2024 at 12:38pm
Do you have an empirical basis for your suspicion or is it simply suspicion?
Comments are closed.